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It’s that time of year again. Things are a bit tense around the house.
The other morning, I woke up to find that someone had placed a leek in my slippers.
Yes it’s Six Nations time again. England are playing Wales on Saturday. The lovely Debbie is getting into the spirit of the occasion…by exhibiting extreme antagonism to all things English.

Whilst the patriot in me would like to cheer on the Red Rose on Saturday, I have decided that discretion ( or in this case, cowardice) is the better part of valour and will instead, sit quietly in the corner, hoping for a draw. That way, I’ve not sold out completely and next week will be far more pleasant if Wales have not lost.

For those readers who know Rugby Union as merely another one of those odd games that we English let our former colonies win at, all you need to know is, the Welsh take this sport very seriously.

In the meantime, I’m trying to keep a low profile, which means playing around with APEX 4.1.

The heady excitement of discovering the first decent GUI development environment for PL/SQL programmers since Oracle Forms is now starting to be replaced by some of the harsh realities of modern web development.
For example, how can I reuse all those terribly useful functions that return Ref Cursors ?
I mean, they work fine in PHP and various other languages, and APEX itself is written in PL/SQL. Should be easy, shouldn’t it ?

Er, no.

APEX simply refuses to play. “I laugh in the face of your weakly typed Ref Cursor” it seems to say. Clearly, some persuasion is required if I’m not to end up with a lot of code locked away in my APEX application, unusable by any other programming language I might want to use to build a web front-end for my database.
The way to an APEX application’s heart is, as will become apparent, through Pipelined functions. Continue reading →